No one said they were illegal.
I see what you mean - sorry, Common Tater, I misread “not technically unlawful” as “technically unlawful.”
No problem. You know I’ve wanted a $500 or $1000 bill for a while (just to have the clerk try to make change) just not enough to pay more than face value. $20 over would be OK, $200 would not.
I think it was someone on this board who would obtain a thick stack of crisp new $2 bills and glue them into a checkbook holder once it was empty, they fit perfectly of course. He’d then make a production at the checkout line of tearing out a few when making small purchases. One early internet/Usenet classic was entitled “I Want My Two Dollars Back!” about a fellow who received much grief by attempting to pay for a Taco at with a $2 bill. The clerk thought it must be “counterfeit”, as obviously there’s no such thing as a two dollar bill. I nearly pee’d myself laughing. I’m sure it’s archived yet today somewhere.
It’s a Reddit meme. Some guy took a picture of something and it had a banana in it, so he jokingly said the banana was for scale. So people started including bananas in every pic for a while.
While I’m no expert, I think this may be incorrect if you mean ones like the one shown that has the “Federal Reserve Bank Of Cleveland” overstamp in black ink to the left of the portrait. Those were Federal Reserve Bank Notes, issued by the named individual FRB under essentially the same collateral requirements as the National Bank Notes. I think small-size FRBNs have collector value even in circulated condition.
Perhaps that type of lunch box never became popular in the UK, and the writer didn’t want to confuse the readers?
I’ve seen small ‘suitcases’ that were, however, significantly larger than this and presumably meant to hold small personal items. That’s what I thought this must be until I looked at the pictures.
There was one later issue of gold certificates in 1934, including the famous $100K denomination bearing Woodrow Wilson’s portrait. These were intended only for circulation among the Federal Reserve banks and the Treasury. The wording of the promise-to-pay statement underwent two small but important modifications. First, the phrase “payable in gold coin” was changed to “payable in gold”, allowing the Treasury to pay out bullion at the new statutory gold price, instead of according to the face values of pre-1934 gold coin which had now become much too low. According to the Wiki article on National Bank Notes, raising the gold price from just over $20/oz to $35/oz resulted in a huge accounting gain for the Treasury and enabled it to call in the bonds held as collateral for National Bank Notes, ending the issue of those notes in the process. The second change of wording on the 1934 Gold Certificates was adding the phrase “as authorized by law”. You could no longer be just any Tom, Dick or Harry and show up at the Treasury and exchange your Gold Certificates for bullion. Instead you’d probably be arrested on the spot.
It’s amusing, sort of, that various governments over the years have essentially criminalized an element of the periodic table. Hm.
I haven’t sen a description anywhere, but I reember that in the 70’s I had stack of 10 $10 notes that were bound together and perforated at the left edge, so that you could tear them off. Like travelers cheques.
I had always assumed that they were supplied in that form by the treasury. It’s not impossible: I see that they sell uncut sheets, so I don’t suppose there is any legal reason why they wouldn’t have been selling perforated pads. But I’ve not seen any references to collectors items.
What do you think? Supplied by treasury in that form? Specially made up by a third party for the travel industry? Or just a false memory?
Privately done.
That was Steve Wozniak.
IIRC all nationally chartered banks could issue the banknotes provided they met the reserve requirement, which was a like value (again IIRC) of bonds on deposit with the U.S. Treasury. There was also a requirement for a small fractional gold reserve, but it was the bond deposits that did the heavy lifting where this currency was concerned. Long story short, the National Bank Note program was essentially a monetization of Government debt, much like most currency in the world today. The only difference was that a local bank was issuing the notes rather than a central bank for the whole country, probably as a result the country’s long drawn-out resistance to the idea of a central bank. I think the idea of having 12 FRBs instead of one single huge one was to make the idea of the Federal Reserve system more palatable.
State-chartered banks could continue to issue banknotes if they paid a tax, which was a significant burden and had the intended–and successful-- purpose of forcing state-chartered banks out of the currency issuing business altogether.
In the case of the Federal Reserve Bank Notes from the Cleveland and Richmond FRBs, this is correct since “D” and “E” are the letter codes for those FRBs.
On the Citizens Bank Of South Bend note, the “4764” in black ink is the national charter number for that bank; my guess is that by this point the charter numbers were overstamped by the same machine and at the same time as the promise-to-pay to the left of the portrait. In addition, for the earlier large size note issues, the charter numbers were intricately worked into the filigree around the edge of the note, for example as in this Series 1913 $5 note issued by the National Bank Of San Diego.
Link
(Photographed by me through the window of an Escondido coin shop, with the owner’s permission.)
Here the single-letter codes have a meaning quite different from the FRB codes seen on $1 today. in this case “P” stands for for Pacific. “W” was “West”–but in the 19th Century that meant what we now call the Midwest, “E” was East, and so forth.